I have compiled the following time-lapse video, inspired by Ken Murphy’s “A History of the Sky”. Ken’s time-lapse is actually a mosaic of 360 smaller individual movies, each showing the San Francisco sky throughout a single day. The result is a brilliant and unique visualisation of an entire year of weather in just a few minutes.

I present Her Majesty’s equivalent, “A History of the British Sky”, recorded from the top of a building near the Welsh border. I’m sure you’ll agree that the time taken to process over 3 million individual photographs is repaid ten times over in this video. Such a wealth of information in one view; it’s a feast for the eyes. You can see the change in the length of the British day, for example. And you can clearly pick out the season of summer.

Here’s his video, which truly captures the UK’s meteorological diversity:

I whipped up this little command-line tool for automatically grouping a bunch of image files into individual time-lapse sequences.

This came up after a shoot where I shot a bunch of sequences on the same card. The process of manually finding the individual takes in the big undifferentiated set of images from the card was fairly tedious, and it occurred to me that this could probably be automated by looking at the intervals between the shots. So I created this Perl script that seems to do a pretty good job. You run it like so:

Just in time for the reopening of the Exploratorium at its new location, I completed my Artist-in-Residence project, Time Shift.

The exhibit is for the museum’s new Observatory gallery, which explores human and natural processes in the local environment. My intention was to use time-lapse techniques to reveal patterns and processes that typically go unnoticed.

Over several months I shot a series of sequences around the Bay Area, of subjects such as ships at the Port of Oakland, the cycle of tides, people commuting through downtown San Francisco, weather, and airplane traffic at SFO.

I created a custom iPad application, which visitors use to browse the archive, and select videos which are then displayed on a large external monitor.

Another project I’ve been working on with Popular Mechanics and Radio Shack has been organizing a hacking competing between two hackerspaces. One space is on the East Coast (Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA), and the other is on the West (Ace Monster Toys in Oakland).

Both teams had 30 days to build something out of Radio Shack parts, and they both did an amazing job. Ace Monster toys build an artfully deigned laser shooting gallery, and Artisan’s Asylum built an impressively large laser harp. Video interviews with both teams are on the online voting page, which just went live.

A big print piece (viewable here in PDF form) about the challenge featuring both teams’ projects will be in the August issue of Popular Mechanics, which will be on newsstands any day. This should definitely give some nice visibility for the hackerspace movement!

Here’s another in the series of Radio Shack DIY videos I’ve been working on. This one is about building your own intervalometer (a device that controls the shutter of a camera for shooting time-lapse).

Update: The full build instructions are available on the intervalometer project page on the Radio Shack DIY web site.